Block buster films, such as the latest Star Wars saga, Star Wars; The Force Awakens, have produced a unique influence on our culture by transporting an entire generation of movie goers into unknown worlds with larger-than-life heroes and strange creatures with weird names. Star Wars; The Force Awakens, the seventh in the Star War series, smashed all box office records in its initial opening weekend by grossing almost $530 million world-wide.

Church youth groups have flocked to these films and followed the experience with lively discussions, sometimes in great detail, searching for hidden spiritual meaning in the action. Terms such as “The Force” and the “Dark Side” along with characters like Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Obi-Wan Kenobi hold particular interest for discussion. Is film maker George Lucas trying to tell us something about our culture? Our world? Is there a spiritual connection? Do these epics have any relationship to Christianity?

Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Avatar and other such recent mythical block busters have spawned a merchandising frenzy. Gifts for all occasions, including fashionable party costumes featuring movie themes, have flooded store shelves with an incredible financial reward for Hollywood. At this point, I don’t intend to create a movie discussion. However, I would like to consider the impact of this movie genre on our culture. Suffice to say, filmmakers such as George Lucas have turned Hollywood green ($) with envy!

In the Star War sagas, the technique of story-telling utilized by George Lucas is not new and certainly not without precedence in the world of literature. The fantastic characters themselves, however, are. I suspect that these films will continue to produce a revival of story-telling. What better way to draw a reader’s interest than with the idea of a galaxy “long ago” and “far, far, away.” George Lucas’s technique has proven magical, and others will certainly follow his path to notoriety.

In fact, Lucas’s notoriety piqued my interest so much that I wanted to know the origin of his inspiration. Where did he come up with all those outlandish characters? Could there really be a Galactic war looming somewhere in our future? I wish I could say that Lucas’s inspiration came from the Bible. But, alas, such was not the case, although his stories are certainly of biblical proportion and have biblical similarities. There just might be a connection, however, not in the plot itself (we must be cautious at this point), but in the style and story-line of the hero narrative. Here’s what I mean: the overall encompassing theme of the Bible is that of creation, fall, and redemption; in other words, the Bible tells a single story couched underneath the grand umbrella of God’s Grace. The entire Bible fits together into one glorious narrative. The Bible has one hero, the Lord Jesus Christ. By contrast, Lucas presents a grand “hero narrative”, and there are many similarities to Biblical themes, but his story certainly does not have a hero like ours!

George Lucas followed a pattern of story-telling that is characteristic of the world’s great myths, those epic stories that have provided pleasure to listeners and story tellers alike since the origins of the oral tradition. Greeks used the same pattern. So have other cultures from Norse mythology to sea farers in the south Pacific. Classic literary heroes such as Odysseus, Moby Dick, Tarzan, and even Superman are marked by the same template. It’s as if a “blue print” has been overlaid onto these grand myths, and they were unknowingly encoded with a common story line. When Lucas first grasped the history of this “blueprint,” this mythology template, his imagination exploded, and the Star Wars saga (1977) was the result.

Great myths almost always contain a “super hero” who, due to various circumstances, sets about on a mission to change the world, or at least to change some condition which is having a deleterious effect on the hero’s world. The hero leaves home and is eventually thrust into an assortment of conflicts which are necessary for him to struggle and overcome. And, in the end, he returns home triumphant but forever changed as a result of the experiences. There are twelve stages in the hero’s journey, but for simplicity’s sake, three are most prominent: Departure, Initiation/Struggle, and Return. This pattern of mythic story telling produced a term known to scholars as “mono-mythic,” meaning simply that all myths have a commonality (mono) built into their core DNA. The person who first identified “monomyth” was George Campbell, who considered monomyth to encompass “the one great story of mankind.” To Campbell, the monomyth is in fact “The Hero’s Journey”. Campbell’s discovery viewed all mythic narratives as variations on a single great story, regardless of origins or of time or creation. The one great story is the concept of monomyth, and this concept has found its place in our lexicon. In contrast, Biblical scholars refer to a similar concept of story-telling as “meta-narrative,” i.e. one overarching story throughout the entire Bible. The difference in the biblical account is the fact that God’s story is Truth, and it originated in real time and space, while the myth did not. Many people confuse the two and as a result consider all grandiose stories (for example, the Bible) as myth.

OK, so how did Joseph Campbell influence George Lucas? Joseph Campbell was arguably the greatest mythologist of the twentieth century. He was a man of letters, a scholar, essayist, author and a professor of English for over thirty-eight years at Sarah Lawrence College. His seminal work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces was written in 1949, and the material was up-dated to form the author’s biography entitled The Hero’s Journey (2002). Campbell’s work has influenced poets, musicians, playwrights, novelists, mythologists, and many others since its inception. Campbell certainly understood the complexities of storytelling, and to the twelve grand acts of myth (reduced here to three for simplicity) cited above, he added some seventeen sub-categories. Incredibly, Star Wars includes all seventeen. Campbell died in 1987, prior to the completion of the Star War trilogy. But his influence on Lucas was significant. In fact, Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker to openly credit Campbell’s influence, and the linkage between Campbell and Star Wars has been reinforced by biographers and film critics ever since.

How does all of this relate to the Christian’s Hero? The saga begins much the same, as our Hero voluntarily leaves His heavenly home, a place of serenity and unimaginable comfort and glory, to enter into a hostile world, a world of His own creation but weak and wounded due to a great Sin perpetrated eons before. While in the world, our Hero struggled mightily, but He had a special Mentor to help. He was killed but was later resurrected to a glorious state, and in due time, He re-entered His heavenly home, but only temporarily. And, just like the pattern of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, our Hero was forever changed due to the struggle He undertook. But unlike “The Hero’s Journey” of myth, our Hero’s eventual triumph is not yet complete. There remains one great cataclysmic event that must necessarily take place, the creation of a new home exactly on the location of His former creation. The story lingers, but this epic is not over! Our Hero is coming back for those, who in life, trusted in His epic story of redemption.

At this point we depart from comparative mythology (Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey”) which, we know, has been really no comparison all along. You see, our Hero commands us to expect His return, an event which He says will take place at any moment. He also wants us to keep our “lamps” trimmed and full of oil. His story is not myth. Our Hero did not ride off into the sunset to rest on His laurels. He really is coming back!

Gene Stansel
12/22/2015